'Birds of a Feather' is based on true story of same-sex penguin couple Roy and Silo

Liz Lauren photo

Paul Michael Thomson and Aaron Kirby star in "Birds of a Feather" at the Greenhouse Theater Center.

Paul Michael Thomson and Aaron Kirby star in "Birds of a Feather" at the Greenhouse Theater Center. (Liz Lauren photo)

Kerry ReidChicago Tribune

When are penguins — those adorable, tuxedo-clad flightless waddlers — the stuff of controversy? When they’re in a same-sex relationship, of course. The true story of Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who bonded, hatched a spare egg from another penguin, and raised the chick as their own became the subject of the 2005 children’s book by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, “And Tango Makes Three.” The book became one of the most frequently challenged titles in libraries and schools, according to the American Library Association.

Playwright Marc Acito uses Roy and Silo’s tale in his 2011 play, “Birds of a Feather,” now in a local premiere at Greenhouse Theater Center. He adds some extra plumage by tossing in some birds of prey. Pale Male and Lola, a pair of red-tailed hawks who took up residence in a nest at one of Manhattan’s most hoity-toity Fifth Avenue addresses, became a cause celebre when complaints from some residents led to the destruction of their nest in 2004.

If you’re going to weave together an anthropomorphic meditation on sexual orientation, gender roles and the old nature vs. nurture debate, those parallel stories give you a lot to work with. But Acito’s overstuffed nest of a script also drags in exploitative memories of the Sept. 11 attacks and some gossipy digs at newscaster Paula Zahn and her former husband, real estate developer Richard Cohen, who lived in Pale Male’s building. (Cohen reportedly led the drive to evict the birds, while fellow co-op resident Mary Tyler Moore championed them.) We also meet a birdwatcher and a zookeeper whose paths cross in felicitous ways. (More on the latter in a moment.)

Director Jacob Harvey’s simple staging does a lot to bring out the charm in Acito’s sometimes self-conscious and heavy-handed script. Aaron Kirby and Paul Michael Thomson do delightful avian double duty as Silo/Lola and Roy/Pale Male, respectively. In the penguin enclosure, Roy is the show tunes aficionado, while Silo is reluctant to even embrace the term “gay.” In Hetero Hawk Land, Lola is a nasal redhead who just wants to settle down and Pale Male is a preening alpha — well, male. (Christina Leinecke’s cunning quick-change costumes delineate these distinctions with panache, aided by Nick Thornton’s movement design.)

So there is a whiff of gender essentialism of the Mars/Venus variety threaded through the script. An encounter between homophobic Pale Male and Silo causes the latter to begin questioning his relationship with Roy, which becomes further strained once Tango’s arrival makes them all celebrities. Silo’s political awareness — he yearns for freedom outside the zoo — also clashes with his inability to fully embrace his love for Roy. (He’s a bit like a penguin version of Louis Aronson in “Angels in America.”) Roy, too, has a jarring moment when he screams at Silo, “Who the hell wants to be gay?” — which feels distinctly out of character and frankly at odds with the sunny message of both the “Tango” book and Acito’s larger story.

Overall, though, the birds fare better than the human characters. Abu Ansari does get a few nice moments as the lonely birdwatcher. Marika Mashburn brings endearing moxie as the zookeeper. But one of the most frustrating parts of Acito’s script is that he apparently cannot envision a single woman whose life exists outside of work, hanging out with gay men and yearning to be pair-bonded herself. It’s as if the crucial concept of female friendship eludes him, and that reduces Mashburn’s character to lonely spinster caricature too often. Still, Ansari and Mashburn do better with these characters than as Cohen and Zahn, whose marital difficulties seem to be included mostly for the salacious details.

When “Birds of a Feather” zooms in on the difficulties of building a life and nest together, as seen through the eyes of the two bird couples, it hatches some lovely moments of truth even as Acito’s script spins its narrative wheels. (We could easily lose 15 minutes from this story without losing any insight.) But Harvey’s staging and his cast give us some emotional space to ponder the conundrum of looking to animals to validate our own designs for living — even as we make the planet less hospitable for their survival.